Police in the central province of Hunan detained two men for online rumor-spreading after they said 5,000 police were guarding a wedding convoy in the provincial capital of Changsha, the latest in a string of detentions as part of a growing government campaign to manage information online.

The state-run Xinhua news agency says the two men posted video showing the crowd of police walking alongside the wedding convoy. Xinhua quoted local investigators as saying the police happened to be returning from a training drill just as the wedding vehicles made their way through the city’s streets.

Xinhua said the incident occurred Dec. 6 and the men were detained Sunday. They will be held for five days, Xinhua said. Even as the government condemned the video as rumor spreading, it remained available on the Weibo microblogging service Monday afternoon.

The government earlier this year embarked on a nationwide campaign to limit online information it rendered as false. Leading Internet companies including Sina Corp. and Tencent Holdings have come under increasing pressure from government public security and censorship officials.

Leaders worry in particular about the pace information travels online, where tens of thousands of Internet users can coalesce around a particular concern within hours. Chinese Internet executives have attempted to assuage government worries by demonstrating for local officials how social networking can serve as a public relations platform as well. The Beijing municipal government is among the latest to launch an official Weibo account.

Earlier in December, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece People’s Daily newspaper in a commentary compared online rumors to heroin. Internet users can “irresponsibly and unscrupulously produce and spread rumors,” the commentary said. “Such ‘Internet psychological drugs’ are very easily addictive, and make people want to know more and learn more while reading.”

On Saturday, state media quoted Wang Chen, head of the State Internet Information Office, as calling for “more forceful and effective measures to strengthen the construction and management of cyber culture,” according to Agence France-Presse.

Many Internet users see “rumors” as a code word for information the Communist Party disagrees with — though China’s Internet, like the Internet everywhere, does play host to plenty of gossip and speculation.

At a conference on government use of Twitter-like microblogging services held in Beijing on Monday, a spokesman for the Beijing police noted how rumors spread earlier this year that a man who had fallen to his death from the top floor of a local shopping mall was a foreigner who had been shot first. The man turned out to be a pensioner from Shandong province who had jumped over the railing in an apparent suicide bid.

The men’s detention in Changsha on Sunday isn’t the first time Chinese Internet users have been detained and accused of spreading rumors online. Earlier in December, state-run media reported several people were detained after saying HIV and AIDS patients from the northwest Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region had been infecting food with their blood. Local investigators later deemed those claims untrue.